Suggestion search drop-down

Another in today’s series of fun feature enablings…

The search boxes on Wikimedia wikis now have an AJAX-powered search suggestion drop-down. This calls our JSON OpenSearch suggestion interface, which has been used for some time by Firefox’s search box and Mac OS X 10.5’s Dictionary application, but is now built-in for your viewing pleasure.

(In MediaWiki 1.13 development trunk, turn on $wgEnableMWSuggest to experience this yourself!)

A similar AJAX-powered search feature has been in MediaWiki for some time, but the user interface for it took over the whole article area, which was a bit distracting, and we never used it ourselves.

Robert Stojnic, the tireless coder who’s put a huge amount of effort into fixing up our Lucene-based search engine over the last months, patched up the front-end to fit more naturally into the existing forms.

The built-in search for suggestions is currently a simple prefix match, so it’ll help you complete words and names, but isn’t smart enough to fill out from a last name or skip “the” etc. Robert’s got a new backend in the works, which will add all those smarts when we’re ready to upgrade the search systems with the new software and a bit beefier hardware.

Prefix matches are a heck of a lot better than nothing, though, and as long as it’s not causing undue server load we’ll keep it on until the new backend’s ready.

(If you don’t like the suggestions widget, you can disable them by checking “Disable AJAX suggestions” in the “Search” tab at Special:Preferences.)

4 thoughts on “Suggestion search drop-down”

  1. Brion – wanna write up 300 words on all the various improvements in search for the Wikimedia blog? Both on the Wikipedias and on Common, things are *vastly* better than they were even six months ago.

  2. Nice feature!

    I’d like to have the possibility to change the time, after that the drop-down is shown in my Special:Preferences-pages.
    Now, when I’m tipping something in the searchfield, I’ve to wait about 3-4 seconds until the drop-down-list is shown. I personally would like it to appear already after 1-2 seconds; others probably would like it to appear after 5 seconds or more..

    Greetings,
    Michi

  3. Dude, this totally rocks! Presumably bug 7288 can be marked as fixed?

    I only have 2 very minor quibbles:
    * mousing over a suggestion in the dropdown list could maybe show the destination URL in the status bar.
    * the dropdown list could be a little wider perhaps, because it’s only around 15 characters wide, and many Wikipedia articles/redirects have titles far in excess of 15 characters – e.g. if the list was draggable to a desired width, and remembered that width for future searches on that computer, then that could be good.

    However, I emphasise that these are both very minor quibbles based solely on personal preference, and that this a great and thoroughly welcome improvement, and kudos to all involved.

Comments are closed.